OpenStack Neutron provides the network services for the OpenStack cloud. You can select a variety of Neutron setup options, including support for OVS in GRE tunneling mode, OVS in VLAN mode, the Cisco Nexus plugin, and provider networks.

Recommended Release Levels

The following release levels are recommended for any server that is part of an OpenStack cluster:

If Cobbler is used for bare-metal Linux installs, Cobbler 2.4 is recommended.

Proxy Configurations

If your network uses proxies, they must be configured properly in order to download the packages used by the installer.

How to configure your proxy is discussed in Creating the Build Node, on page 18.

Minimum Server Requirements

The following table lists the minimum requirements for the Cisco UCS servers that you use for the nodes in your OpenStack cluster:

Server/Node

Recommended Hardware

Notes

Build node

Processor: 64-bit x86

Server or VM with:

Memory: 4 GB (RAM)

Disk space: 20 GB

The build node must also have Internet connectivity to be able to download Cisco OSI modules and Puppet manifests.

To ensure that the build node can build and communicate with the other nodes in your cluster, it must also have a network interface on the same network as the management interfaces of the other OpenStack cluster servers.

A minimal build node (for example, a VM with 4 GB of RAM and a 20-GB disk) is sufficient for a test install. However, because the build node acts as the puppet master, caches client components, and logs all installation activity you might need a more powerful machine with more disk space for larger installs.

A high-availability deployment on three nodes with each node serving all functions. If Ceph is not used, the compressed_ha_cephall, compressed_ha_cephosd and compressed_ha_cephmon roles can be omitted.

Deploying an active/active highly available control plane with a limited number of nodes and limited scalability.

Note: The node count includes the build node.

Note: "Roles" refers to the roles defined in the data model. Each role defines a package of resources required to function in that role.

The following figures illustrate the deployment scenarios listed in the previous table.